


The Widening Gyre

by ahimsabitches



Category: Hellboy - All Media Types
Genre: Angst, Body Horror, F/M, Gen, a whole lotta misanthropy, eventually there will be sex?, nature stuff
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-04-26
Updated: 2016-05-08
Packaged: 2018-06-04 14:05:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 5,941
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6661534
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ahimsabitches/pseuds/ahimsabitches
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Set shortly before the events of BPRD: Hell on Earth. This fic exists in my personal blend of the movie verse and the comics verse, so don't look for any kind of hard and fast continuity with either. If you've seen the movies but not read the comics, you'll be fine. I draw more from the movie verse anyway. There is no update schedule for this fic. It will update when I can.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

> Turning and turning in the widening gyre  
> The falcon cannot hear the falconer;  
> Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;  
> Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,  
> The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere  
> The ceremony of innocence is drowned.  
> The best lack all conviction, while the worst  
> Are full of passionate intensity.
> 
> ~William Butler Yeats

When something changes, there's always someone around to complain about it. Especially trees. Trees are slow and cranky; they root in and weather through, but they always complain about the bluster of the storm. The relentless grind of time. The only things that they know, in their staid wooden hearts, that’ll fell them.

But they weren't complaining about this, so I didn't know. How could I have known?

I slunk under their graceful green umbrellas on the tawny paws I'd come to love. I'd come to love my forest. It was mine. I knew it, and they all knew me.

Nobody said anything.

How could I have known?

I stumbled on it, literally.

It was in a clearing, surrounded by _thems_.

The thems were headless, but not quite. Bottom jaws jutting from halved skulls ringed around inner cores like...trees. Their truncated throats clicked juicily.

The puma's eyes hadn't seen these creatures before, but I had. I growled.

The angels, all parched paper-creased skin, ridged spines, and veiny membranes stretched over wingbones like a hellish copy of shattered leaves, chattered around the thing. The thing that gave off a sick, buzzing pulse. I shook my head and growled louder to chase out the buzzing. I kept to the sun-dappled underbrush and stalked them. The silent trees did not give my passage any cover. 

Nine angels. Always nine.

They weren't really angels, but that's what Red had called them.

 _Hey, Angelface_ , he'd rasped out of one side of his mouth, yellow eyes flinty. I could see him in front of me. The cigar stuck in the other corner of his mouth. Gave his words a little _lischp_. Then he shot them with a hollowpoint full of water and they disintegrated.

 _Angel_ suited these things. In a perverse way. Better than calling them what they were.

They were burying the thing: a hideous pulsing clot of cancerous life. Lumpy and bleeding and vaguely cube-shaped. Eyes. Lidless. Rolling. Teeth, in neat rows or grotesque clumps. Lumps, oozing fluid. Sprigs of wiry black hair. Bones, warped like no bones I'd inhabited or eaten or broken, stuck out from the hulking thing like arrows. Mouths, lipless and pouting, moues of hunger. Flesh, mottled pink and sick greenwhite and infected red, pulsed lazily in half a dozen heartbeats. And just there, on its side, pointing over my right shoulder, a human finger. Curling and uncurling lazily. Beckoning. I _hated_ it then.

The hole beside the clotted thing was man-height. Even if the angels could transform their spidery hands into spades, it had to have taken them a while to scoop out such a divot in the earth. Why hadn't the worms told me? Why hadn't the trees cried out when they felt their roots sawed off?

The thing hummed like a fly-covered corpse in my head. I hated it, hated the angels, and _lunged_. I would sink my teeth into them and stop all their lives.

I tore one angel's dusty throat and opened another's crumbling guts before they lay their hands on me and _put me down._

I am old, but not as old as them. I am strong, but not as strong as this nine, not in the body I'd chosen.

I screamed and thrashed, flung my teeth and claws at them. The angels had lain me down close to the pulsing thing, near the hole. The earth smelled deep and dark and good. The thing smelled rotten and soggy and sweaty and piggish. _Brute_ , the word came to me then. _Human_ , came the word right behind it. The thing smelled like all the worst parts of _human_.

My back leg kicked the thing. It was sickeningly soft. Right before they killed the puma's body, I forced its eyes out of its skull and poured my presence out of its mouth, nose, eyesockets.

 _I'm sorry_ , I said to the puma's body as I fled the wet crunching sounds of the angels feasting. _I'm sorry your death was not a natural one. I'm so sorry your flesh will not renew the earth._

I mourned as I flew past the silent trees.

* * *

 

The puma had taken my taking of its body as a giving, a gift; I had chosen It as my home, and the puma's soul had been duly honored to step aside. It would get another body eventually.

But I knew these humans wouldn't see it that way. Humans think their one arrangement of molecules, changeling itself, is the only chance at existence they'll ever get. I wish it was so. Ignorant, nearsighted humans.

I slipped into the male. Humans are always jolted at first. It must feel terrible, because the only consciousness they're used to having in their bodies are their own. How boring. How maladaptive. The male fought me. _Hush, little boy_. I took his soul by the scruff and _put it down_.

I shook. Blinked. My name was Darren McCombs, and I was thirty two years old, and I was born of an Irish mother and a Russian father and I spoke English with a New York accent and my wife Steffy was standing beside me asking me if I was okay.

"Fine," I said from my weak man-throat. The Steffy-female put a paw--hand-- on my feebly muscled shoulder and cocked her head in concern; a gesture that was both entirely human and entirely not. I liked it despite the wormy discomfort of being in Darren's body.

"You're really pale. Are you sure you're okay? You kinda jerked like... I dunno."

I missed my puma body. It had been sleek and silent and strong. Unlike this gangly thing with ridiculously little muscle on its well-designed skeleton. Lungs unused to breathing. Weak, inefficient blood. A heart so neglected by inactivity it nearly frightened me. Humans were so ungrateful. Their bodies were a wonder of form and function, and instead of caring for them and worshiping the thing that had given them life, they poured poison into themselves for _fun_. They grew roots into their couches. They refused to eat unless their food seared their mouths with sweetness. Or tasted like the box it came in.

I made Darren smile and put a hand on Steffy's cheek. "I'm fine, I promise. Just felt a spiderweb."

Steffy's face cleared instantly. Ropes of braided black hair dyed blazing green flopped into her doebrown eyes and she laughed. I liked that too. It had music, like birdsong.

Humans usually mated one-at-a-time, and this was a mated pair. I knew Steffy would grieve when Darren's body had to leave her, but I knew there was no way I could explain what had happened to him, and how he was now me.

The best thing to do was just do it, and quickly.

So I turned Darren's body down the trail and bade it _run_.

The backpack bumped against my lower back. Spikes of pain. Barely into adulthood and this body already had _soft spots._ Steffy called Darren's name. First confused; amused. My calves were already burning. Steffy's voice was shrill with alarm now, calling after her mate, wavering as she made chase. My inefficient lungs tore breath from the air. The water bottle on Steffy's backpack sloshed behind me.

I burned through my body's ready energy shortly after I turned off the flat graveled trail and uphill through the trees. Humans-- cocooned in their boxes-within-boxes-- haven't known or cared how to sync the heartbeat of the earth to their own for a long time. So my body was a storm of pain. Screaming muscles, glasspointed joints, a runaway heart. But I forced the body on, over rock and through thick, soggy drifts of last season's leaves, up and then down. Humans can endure. I'll give them that.

And Steffy was behind me, _close_ , calling _Darren, where are you going, come back, please, you're scaring me!_

I hadn't wanted her close to the buried thing, in case some part of her mind was the meat on which it fed. Darren's body was an experiment, and I supposed I'd get a second experiment now.

The angels usually left a sizzling trail of corruption in their wake: corpses, drought-dry stalks, blighted earth. But the place where the thing was buried was overgrown. Kudzu, new-green despite the lateness of summer, exploded out of the brush. I cried out, but it came out an airless _huuuh_. I panted. Steffy panted beside me.

"Darren...what...is it? What's… wrong with you?"

I didn't know.

Something was wrong, though.

The mosquito hum I'd heard the last time drilled into my head. I screamed; the sound much less fearsome from a man-throat. I screamed again, this time from _my_ core, because something was _pushing me out._ Something _mean_ and _strong_ and _eager_.

I let go of Darren and used all my power to fight the thing trying to muscle its way into Darren's body.

I am vicious. But not as vicious as the thing.

Its malignant presence clamped down on me and made me watch as it made Darren fish out the small but sharp knife he kept in his pocket. Steffy said something. The thing made Darren slip the knife between his ribs. _Oh crap_ , I thought. Steffy shrilled something. The thing buzzed louder as Darren bled. I struggled uselessly. Darren fell and the thing buzzed and I realized it was laughing.

It let me go. I flew out of Darren on the last weak twitch of his heart and burrowed into Steffy before the thing could; she offered no resistance in the extremity of shock and grief. Her soul was already shattered and shedding it was as easy as shaking rain from fur. I was Stephanie Matterhorn and I was twenty-nine years old and I was born in Tennessee to a mother with pale skin and a father with dark skin and I was about to be forced to commit suicide.

I bade my new home _run_ again.

The thing buzzed a laugh after me, but made no chase.

" _Oh crap oh crap oh crap_ ," I panted.


	2. Homecoming

I paced the living box-- "townhome"-- and tried to remember what I'd looked like the last time the guys had seen me. It had been, what, three years? No, longer. Closer to five. The forest had had no sense of time, but Steffy and her reality had, and I'd spent the last few hours flipping through her memories to catch up.

After the thing had killed Darren-- no, made him kill himself-- I'd used the last of his mate's fading muscle memory to get me from the hiking trail back to their... "townhome". By then, most of my memories of other human bodies had returned like old pilings exposed by waves on the beach. I hated this, breathing city air, living in a box, almost as much as I hated the thing, but I knew what I had to do.

The thing was in my forest. If it was killing people, it would kill other things. The kudzu would spread and choke down the trees. I closed my eyes and saw my friends, deer and fox and quail and stoat and snake, fling themselves off cliffs and turn away from food and water and slam their skulls against stones...

I shook. No point for that. The thing was killing in my forest. Angels had brought it here, and the only people who knew about angels-- and where to find them and stop them-- were the Bureau.

And, despite the strangenesses that walked those halls, I couldn't trot through the doors as a deer or fox or puma.

So I would endure humanity again.

Reeking, _viral_ humanity.

But at least... at least I'd see Red again. And Abe. And Liz. And Roger. He was an odd one, but I liked him and he liked me. Because we were opposites, in a way. I’m a soul without a body and he’s a body without a soul.

How had I looked? I couldn't remember, but I knew my skin was darker this time. The green hair had been on the last body, though, which was an uncanny coincidence. Luck? Or had the forest brought Steffy to me for a reason? If it had, why hadn't it just told me about the killing thing sooner? The question gnawed at me like a growling dog.

The box-house smelled like sour flowers and burnt wax. Scented candles. And human-smell. Like shrieking hogs. Without the scent of the earth to keep it clean.

Steffy's body had been, surprisingly, much fitter than Darren's. She'd treated it well. Kept it lithe and strong and efficient. That had been close to the body I'd had before. The military was a plague within a plague, but fighters had to be fit, and they tended to stay that way even after leaving. _You never stop fighting in your head,_ I’d heard one of them say. _You never stop fighting, so you have to stay ready to stay alive._ I liked that. That was how humans  _should_ act.

Steffy was a bit shorter than the other body, though. Abe would know me immediately, maybe Roger too, but the rest probably would not.

The furniture in the box-house was full of hard edges. Not a speck of growing green in the place. The magazine resting on the glass coffee table proclaimed the whole thing "modern". I proclaimed it a horrid waste of honest wood. The trees were so far gone, so painted over, so sawed and hacked and spiked through that they no longer had voices.

I dressed Steffy's body simply for the visit: tawny-colored pants from Darren's closet (Steffy's pants had no pockets-- what's the point of wearing clothes if you can't carry things with them?) with belt cinched tight, and a shirt that clung to my torso and left my arms free to move. I made it six steps down the smoke-choked sidewalk and then I stepped on a piece of glass.

Dripping blood and grimacing, I hopped on one foot back up the four flights of stairs, bandaged the pad of my foot with white gauze and old curses, and sullenly wiggled my feet into a pair of Steffy's shoes.  
I tried not to limp. Steffy and Darren lived far from the Bureau, but I knew my way like the goose knows south.

The regular dull pulse of pain from my foot was easy to ignore. Pain was pain. But being human wasn't like anything else.

To be human was to be strengthless, hairless, delicate. To be human was to endure, to innovate, to persevere past doggedness to desperation. To be human was to think outside oneself, outside the world, beyond all the limitations they'd set for themselves, and yet be bound to death by ones they create and fear.

To be human was to be in agony. To seek the connection they'd given up thread by thread, to try to fill the emptiness between their hearts and stomachs with everything else, to flail blindly amongst lifegiving green and blue and brown and see only the redness of their own closed eyelids.

To be human was to be female or male or neither or anything in between. To be human was to cloak oneself in expression. Or use it as a beacon. Or a trap. Or a gift.

I had understood this in the same way a puma cub understands that she must hunt and catch food herself one day. It is a reality, but it does not touch her. Yet.

It did not touch me until I met Red.

Red and I came from opposite ends of Where?, but we existed in the same corner of humanity's mind now that we were here: Pariah. Monster. Freak.

Red isn't human, but he loves them. Thinks like them. Expresses himself like them. Or at least wants to.

I'd been on earth for a few human centuries before the Bureau ferreted me out. My first home was the largest human male I could find, because I'd been told they were the apex predators.

Let's just say I was surprised at what I found in that five-decades-old three-hundred-pound body.

Human females were marginally better, but animals were better still. Kinder, in an unknowingly brutal way. They did their business, lived and ate and shat and died and it was simple. They did not hate; they did not grow jealous. They did not lie; they were not cruel. They knew without knowing what was best for them, and if what was best for them was not best for the whole, they were eliminated. It was a system elegant in its harmony, and I loved it. Love it. Present tense.

It was a system that, somehow, humans had figured out how to escape.

Human women were as bad as human men often, but occasionally you found one like Steffy, like what-was-her-name from before, that had some awareness.

I guess these kinds of humans were the ones Red was really fighting for. I couldn't imagine him wanting to save or even care about the rest: the liars, cheaters, the killers, the sinners that filled hell and kept those angry engines turning out things like angels. Like the pulsing mass of cancer that was going to kill _my_ forest.

So when I had to be human, I tried to be one of the decent ones. I had preferred females before Red, and I preferred them now for the same reasons plus one: Red looked at females differently than males, and I liked the way he looked at females better.

It wasn’t predatory, like so many men gazed at women. It was curious, kind, a little confused. Red's eyes can be the sharpest things about him. They can also be the most gentle.

Liz got most of his softness. But I didn't begrudge her, human though she was. She'd been there for him, with him, for much longer than I had. They were--are-- a bonded pair. Bonded, not mated. At least not before I left.

Human bodies were efficient as bodies go, but I had been walking all morning, and I was hungry. All I could smell was diesel and rotten garbage. I did see people eating from brightly-colored carts on streetcorners, but the scent reeking from those things I filed firmly under the "rotten garbage" category. I'd had a hot dog before. Red had laughed at the face I'd made until I'd puked on him.

I'd be hungry until I got to the Bureau. They would have something other than pancakes and nachos and rotten eggs. Maybe a nice rabbit. Or a turtle I could crack into. My mouth watered.

The building was just as I remembered it: a behemoth of white stone, forbidding and dour, the flame in front burning in its bowl. The spear-topped fence and armed gate through which I had to look to see them were new though. I stood under the quietly whirring eye of the camera and spoke into the gridded communicator: "Hi. I'm looking for the BPRD. My name is Cree. I know Hellboy and Abe Sapien and Liz Sherman. I used to work with them." The voice-- mine now-- was clear and sure.

Silence.

"Hello? Can I speak to Abe Sapien? Hello?"

Nothing. I sighed.

"Tell Manning the creepy nature girl is back."

Manning's stentorious bellow always carried, and some doors and windows he'd thought were soundproof were not.

I still got no response. The gate did not budge.

I hadn't practiced any of my skills in this body; I hadn't practiced any of them in a long time. Since the last time I was at the Bureau. Hadn't needed to.

But if these assholes were going to be _ornery_ about it...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As stated in the summary of the work, please don't look for any kind of continuity or similarity with either the comics or the movies. This is a mishmash of timelines and events from both. This story is VERY loosely placed before the events of the Hell on Earth arc, but again, don't take that too literally.


	3. Introductions

I took a deep breath, centered myself in the body. Whose body? I didn't remember. Good. It was mine now. Energy pooled below my belly. I swept my hand across the space in front of me, fingers spread like a net. Droplets of water, collecting to blobs, floated behind it. I smiled. Good thing it was overcast today. A dry, sunny day would have required a few passes, and whoever was behind the cameras would have had time to either shoot me or arrest me.

I straightened my hand with a mental command: _BLADE_

The water instantly crystallized into an elongated blade of ice and I shot it into the lock on the gate by pushing outward. I heard a low electric sizzle from the lock. I pulled my hand back. The ice melted and dripped into the wounded steel. I formed my hand into a claw; the ice reformed. I couldn't see it, but I heard a soft crrunch and then a grinding clunk and the gate dropped a rattling inch. I heaved it back on its track and it went like a grumpy mule.

No one came out to arrest me or shoot me. The automatic guns atop the gates tracked me as I moved.

No one sat behind the sprawling desk inside the high-vaulted lobby, done up in black-and-silver granite and steel.

"Uh," I said, and the sound echoed mournfully in the cavernous room.

Usually the Bureau's security was a bit tighter than this. I turned a slow circle, waiting for guns, for men, for an ambush.

A noise, not made by a living thing, spun me toward it. An elevator door whirred open on my right and a man-shape stepped out, clad in nothing but a pair of black bicycle shorts and green striped skin that glimmered a little in the screaming white fluorescents.

My heart swelled and I grinned. "Abe!"

"Cree," he said, and inclined his sleek head. I threw my arms around his neck and remembered how cool his skin was. Like the fish I snatched from the creek. But he had no scales, just smooth sleek hairless flesh, patterned green and blue and brown. I kissed his gills. How happy I was to see him surprised me. In a good way.

I’d never met Trevor Bruttenholm; he died before I joined the BPRD. But I’d had it separately from Liz and Red that Abe was Trevor’s spiritual successor as much as his literal one. Red may have been the beating heart of the BPRD, but Abe was its soul.

Abe looked at me with his huge oildrop eyes. I didn’t mind, though the look was appraising.

"You've taken more bodies," he said, a little sadly.

I knew he meant human bodies. Even though he wasn’t human, he didn't much care for the animal bodies I took. And why would he? The BPRD was for saving humans, not the environment in which they lived. I kept the smile on my face. "I had to. After I left I... lost the last one."

"How, Cree?"

Both of us knew he knew how. I wouldn’t say it, though, not right now. It wasn’t the foot I wanted to lead from. "Long story. But I went to the forests. Lived there since. All over. I went up to the cold ones in the north. The humans spoke French, and then they spoke Nunavut. Then there were no humans. Not much forest up that way, but I liked the snow. And the creatures. All white and fuzzy."

"And angels brought you back," he said matter-of-factly.

My shoulders sagged and so did my heart. "They planted something in my forest, and... Abe, things went wrong."

He leaned in slightly, his fishlipped mouth turning down in concern.

I whispered, but even the sibilance echoed in the yawning granite of the lobby. "It was a... thing. A living thing, but... not like a single being. It was about this tall--" I leveled a downward-facing palm at where Abe’s nose would have been, "-- and about two armspans wide--" I held out my arms, hands bookending. "Like a... lumpy cube of guts. Pink and red. Teeth and eyes and bones and..." my hands were claws and my teeth were bared in disgust. "And it had a voice, but not spoken. It spoke in my head. I was a puma. The angels were burying it. I attacked, and the angels killed the puma. I got out. I took a man. I had to. I had to go back and see what they’d done. There was kudzu everywhere. It couldn't have grown that fast. I was only gone a day. Day and a half at most. The thing was still there, though, buried. And it made that sound again." I looked at him then, full in the face, holding the blackness of his eyes with the brownness of mine. "Abe, whatever that thing was, it pushed me out of that man's body. It took control of him and it made him stick a knife in himself. It made me watch while it killed him. If it can do that to him, it'll do that to my animals. That kudzu'll grow over the whole forest in weeks. It'll kill everything that goes there or lives there. It'll kill my forest. And if angels are involved, there could possibly be more of those things. Or something worse. The trees didn’t tell me,” I said, panicked butterflies suddenly flitting in my heart. “They always tell me when something’s wrong. I get a message somehow. The trees didn’t tell me about this. I didn’t know.”

We looked at each other for a while. Abe’s lips thinned to a knotted length of rope. He took a breath and turned back toward the elevator. "Come with me," he called after me. I followed him into the elevator. We went down six floors, but turned right instead of left. I looked a question at him. He said nothing.

"We're not going to Manning?"

"We need to know exactly what this... _thing_ is before I speak to Manning. And you need more training. Four years ago you could have sheared straight through the steel on that gate." The briefest smile crossed his face as the elevator binged softly. We stepped out into a sterile hallway that held the black-and-chrome theme of the lobby. I noticed a slight jerkiness in his normal fluid grace. Kept my mouth shut about it.

“You _let_ me break the gate? And Manning didn’t threaten to turn you into sushi?” I smiled despite the unease.

“I had to see,” he mumbled distractedly and turned down a hallway into a part of the complex with which I was unfamiliar. They must’ve gotten more money from the government. A lot more. My foot hurt. The hallway went on. Sprouted doors. Some small and simple, some large and reinforced. Signs I could barely read. Reading’s always one of the last things to come back to me.

The hallway went on, sprouted other hallways like treebranches. The pain in my foot was a steady hum radiating up my leg and mixing with the pangs in my empty stomach.

Manning was a grade-A certified asshole, but he did his job in spades. He wouldn’t do his job so well if, deep down, he didn't care. It was a divining rod, this caring, I’d learned. Figure out into which vessel a human pours his or her life, and you’ll find out what that human loves.

“Abe? Who is that? Does she have clearance? Security detected a breach in the gate!”

Speak of the devil.

His voice boomed down the hall before I saw him. I grinned, glad for the distraction from fear. He rounded the corner into view, two men in black suits tailing him. He walked like a constipated peacock. Had a face like a mildly horrified Basset hound. I’d missed him, in my own way.

“Manning!” I called jovially, matching the volume of his voice. “Don’t you recognize me?” I opened my arms. He huffed and peered. Darted his baleful eyes between me and Abe, who remained silent and blank-faced.

“This is the girl,” Manning spat, jabbing a finger at me. “This is the girl that breached our gate!”

The two suits moved from behind Manning toward me.

“I gave clearance,” Abe said primly. “This is Cree. She’s come back.”

At mention of my name, Manning drew back. His face didn’t change much. It never really did; confused alarm had taken up a living in his jowls and thundery forehead. The rest was just a matter of degrees.

It was easy to look Manning in the eye because he was so afraid of us. No, not quite afraid. There was fear in him, but not for the usual reason. Humans fear what they don’t understand. Manning understood us, despite his best efforts. No, he was afraid of us because he could not control us, and he knew his life’s work, this place, depended on us staying hidden. We stayed hidden, and the government kept funding the BPRD. And Manning got to keep what he loved.

Red was bad at staying hidden. I was really good at it. When I wanted to be.

“Cree!” His eyebrows rocketed up higher than I’d have thought possible. “Oh no, I don’t need another bodysnatcher! No! Whatever you’ve got, we don’t need it!” He took a step back.

I glanced at Abe. Another bodysnatcher? Was there someone else like me living here now? Abe flicked his eyes at me but said nothing. No matter. I'd find out eventually.

“Glad to see you too,” I said to Manning, pasting the smile back on and stepping towards him. Making him as uncomfortable as possible was a sport, and I needed to get back on my game if they let me stay here. Red would have had almost five years of practice ahead of me. “I’m getting kinda tired of this body, Manning,” I purred, sidling close to him and giving him all the signals a woman gives a man when she’s interested in mating. “I’ve always wanted to know what it’s like to be you. Big strong man like you. I’d even let you stay. You and I could be in there together.” I made to tap his temple, but he shied. “What fun we’d have together, Manning.” I let my tongue slip out between my teeth and he made a strangled noise in his throat.

“A-Abe! I’m not allowing this… thing in here! Get it out!” he pointed at me again and I chuckled. Technically he had final say, since his was the mouth that suckled at the government’s teat, and his were the hands from which the milk and honey of this place flowed. But Manning had been evicting Red since before I could remember. And he was still here. At least I thought so. Hoped so. Abe hadn’t mentioned him at all. Things had clearly changed a lot while I was gone, and suddenly I was worried.

“Where’s Red? And Liz? And the rest of the guys?” I asked Abe. “Manning hasn’t booted them out yet, has he?”

Abe sighed a longsuffering sigh. A father dealing with his errant children. “Excuse us, Mister Manning,” he said, and moved forward.

We breezed past the stuttering suited monkey in a double-breasted coat and his two lackeys. Abe said nothing. We were let into a room at the far end of the hall. Abe said nothing. The room yawned; a chrome-and-steel throat. Longer than the lobby, but not as tall. Abe said nothing. He went to the wall, tapped it with a webbed knuckle. A pneumatic drawer hissed out. He plucked something from it and put it in my hand. A seed. “Make it grow,” he said.

How? There was no life here to pull from, save us two. I wouldn’t dare pull from Abe, and pulling from my body was like drinking my own sweat to stay hydrated.

I looked down at it. A round thing, pale and woody. Lotus. I looked at Abe. He said nothing. Not with his mouth anyway. You need more training, he said with all the rest of him. Suddenly all that rest of him was old and hunched over and very _human_.

My gaze pierced him this time, but not very far at all. I couldn’t do what Abe could do. _Abe, what’s wrong_ was on my lips but something in those ocean-black eyes stopped the words.

I turned away from him, closed my eyes, and Called.

I never used the Call when I was in an animal body. Never needed to. Usually animals lived in a near-constant state of Calling, their souls exquisitely attuned to the vast ebb and flow of life around them. They couldn’t do exactly what I did, but then again they weren’t the semi-ageless incorporeal flotsam of some intergalactic shipwreck.

All matter is energy vibrating too slowly. I am too slow for energy; too quick for matter. I, and others like me, were paused sometime during the seesaw of matter to energy and back. We don’t know when exactly. We had sentience. Given or developed it; nobody is sure. I don’t remember much except the last three hundred years or so. In fact I don’t know if there really are others like me, but the universe is pretty big. I glanced at Abe and remembered Manning’s comment: _I don’t need another bodysnatcher._

I Called again. It was difficult to Call through steel, but I felt an answer: faint and hesitant above me to my left. I urged it on. The steel plating on the ceiling groaned and strained. Humans got one thing very very right: _nature conquers all_.

The root, shoelace-thin at the tip tapering to the thickness of Red's stone arm, burst through and snaked down towards me. The plate it had knocked out hit the floor with a BANGBANG BONG loud as a gunshot. The root had punched a dent in the steel a handspan deep. Dirt sprinkled down onto the floor, my braids, Abe’s shoulders.

The root slid lovingly into my open hand. I held it gently. Breathed. The root and its tree breathed with me. The lotus pod in my other hand breathed with us. I felt a slow, soft movement. I looked down at the lotus plant, slowly growing down my arm, down to the ground. It was cool and heavy. The blossoms smiled pinkly at me. The tips of the petals seemed dipped in blood. It reminded me of the thing in my forest. A ripple of unease passed through me and the root withdrew. More dirt sifted down.

Abe sighed at the warped steel plate. "I meant without help."

"I couldn't without help. There was nothing to draw from except for us two. I'm not gonna draw your energy away from you, Abe." He looked exhausted enough already.

He sighed again, turned, walked toward the door. Held up a hand when I followed.

“Stay here. Practice. I’ll come get you in a few minutes. There are seeds in that drawer.” He pointed to the place on the wall he’d tapped before.

I jammed my hands on my hips, anger spiking. I didn’t like this. Abe had never been garrulous or joyful, but I never remembered any commands falling from his lips either. And where was Red? Why hadn’t we at least gone to say hi?

When something changes, there’s always someone around to complain about it. _My turn_. “I don’t gotta do what you tell me, Fishface. I could fold you in half without touching you.”

Without turning, he said, “Not yet. That’s why I want you to practice. I hope I’m wrong about the thing you saw, but if I’m not, we’ll need everybody at full strength.”

The door swung shut with a clunk-click.

“But I’m _hungry_ ,” I said to the empty room.


End file.
